Defining requirements for a gamified programming exercises format

Computer programming is a complex domain both to teach and learn. This incited endeavors to find methods that could mitigateat least some of the existing barriers. In the last years, automatic assessment has been playing an important role in reducing theburden of teachers in the assessment of students’ attempts to solve programming exercises and fostering the autonomy of studentsby allowing them to practice in any place and at any time with timely feedback.Even more recent development is the use of gamification in computer programming education in order to raise the enjoyment andengagement of students. Despite its rising spread, until now, there is not a programming exercise specification format addressingthe needs of gamification, such as the definition of challenges, the underlying storyline, including the links to other exercises, orthe rewards for solving challenges in form of points, badges or virtual items. Such a data format would allow the exchange ofready-to-use programming exercises along with the gamification-related data among different educational institutions and courses,providing instructors a possibility to make use of gamification in their courses without having to invest their own time in defininggamification rules themselves.In this paper, we analyze a set of concepts related to programming gamification developed in our previous work to identify therequirements for the specification of a gamified exercise format.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Convergence of Gamification and Machine Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent developments in human–computer interaction technologies raised the attention towards gamification techniques, that can be defined as using game elements in a non-gaming context. Furthermore, advancement in machine learning (ML) methods and its potential to enhance other technologies, resulted in the inception of a new era where ML and gamification are combined. This new direction thrilled us to conduct a systematic literature review in order to investigate the current literature in the field, to explore the convergence of these two technologies, highlighting their influence on one another, and the reported benefits and challenges. The results of the study reflect the various usage of this confluence, mainly in, learning and educational activities, personalizing gamification to the users, behavioral change efforts, adapting the gamification context and optimizing the gamification tasks. Adding to that, data collection for machine learning by gamification technology and teaching machine learning with the help of gamification were identified. Finally, we point out their benefits and challenges towards streamlining future research endeavors.publishedVersio

Teaching Tip: What You Need to Know about Gamification Process of Cybersecurity Hands-on Lab Exercises: Lessons and Challenges

Cybersecurity education is becoming increasingly important in modern society, and hands-on practice is an essential element. Although instructors provide hands-on labs in their cybersecurity courses, traditional lab exercises often fail to effectively motivate students. Hence, many instructors desire to incorporate gamification in hands-on training to engage and motivate cybersecurity students, especially beginner learners. Given the dearth of guiding examples, this paper aims to describe the holistic process of converting traditional cybersecurity hands-on lab exercises to gamified lab exercises in an undergraduate network security course. We find that the gamified cybersecurity lab promotes students’ engagement, learning experience, and learning outcomes. The results show the positive acceptance of gamification by students as well as instructors. While gamification has been used in competitions and training, the success in the classroom and students’ desire for more gamification show that further investment in gamification will be more important in the classroom. We expect this paper to help instructors who are interested in gamification 1) convert traditional lab exercises to gamified labs; 2) estimate the extra workload and potential benefits; and 3) plan resources for implementation. This process is applicable to any cybersecurity courses with hands-on assignments

Teaching Tip: Teaching Business Process Concepts in an Introductory Information Systems Class: A Multi-Level Game-Based Learning Approach

This research develops an effective methodology for a core business introductory information systems course to teach business process concepts and the role of information systems in business processes. The developed methodology also helps students properly diagram an organization’s business processes. The methodology uses an experiential learning approach: Multi-dimensional Game-based Learning. Initially, students learn elementary business processes and modeling concepts, e.g., start, end, activity, and gateway. Advancing to a more complex process during the second level, student teams learn the concept of process activity responsibility, e.g., role, pool. The last level challenges student teams to manage a company in a simulated business environment using an SAP® Enterprise Resource Planning system. Students learn the relationship between information systems and business processes and the concepts of data flow, encapsulation, event, and parallelism. A survey of the student’s perception and the researchers’ ad hoc observations demonstrates the effectiveness of the developed methodology

Teaching how to program using automated assessment and functional glossy games (Experience Report)

Our department has long been an advocate of the functional-first school of programming and has been teaching Haskell as a first language in introductory programming course units for 20 years. Although the functional style is largely beneficial, it needs to be taught in an enthusiastic and captivating way to fight the unusually high computer science drop-out rates and appeal to a heterogeneous population of students.This paper reports our experience of restructuring, over the last 5 years, an introductory laboratory course unit that trains hands-on functional programming concepts and good software development practices. We have been using game programming to keep students motivated, and following a methodology that hinges on test-driven development and continuous bidirectional feedback. We summarise successes and missteps, and how we have learned from our experience to arrive at a model for comprehensive and interactive functional game programming assignments and a general functionally-powered automated assessment platform, that together provide a more engaging learning experience for students. In our experience, we have been able to teach increasingly more advanced functional programming concepts while improving student engagement.The authors would like to thank the precursors of the 20-year functional programming culture and FPro unit at our university, and all the instructors and TAs that have been involved in the PLab unit throughout the years. This work is financed by the ERDFs European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT s Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013

Utilizing a Modular Approach to Gamification to Improve Nutrition and Fitness in Children

Obesity is a worldwide epidemic that affects adults and children, impacts over 30% of the population in several states of the U.S., damages national economies, and is a factor in four out of the six of the leading causes of death, including diabetes and heart disease. Obesity is preventable: solution approaches include better education, more exercise, better nutrition, and changing eating habits. Still, it is difficult for many people to remain interested enough to educate themselves and to learn new behaviors to change their eating and exercise habits. Gamification is a relatively new research area that involves using video game mechanisms to make applications such as work, education, and behavior change seem less like a job and more like entertainment. The objective of this thesis is to develop a system for gamifying the process of education and behavior change aimed at reducing obesity in children. The approach involved identifying requirements, developing a methodology, implementing a suite of games, developing a common application program interface and integration framework so that metrics from the games could form a user progress model that is securely sharable with parents, educators, and health professionals. The idea is that as users get better at playing the game, they will get healthier. We specified the following requirements for the framework and suite of games: large domain coverage in the areas of nutrition and fitness; extensibility and scalability; user diversity; measurability and metrics; and security and privacy. A working prototype at http://www.edufitment.com demonstrates the framework and the games developed so far. Future work will involve refining the game content coverage with the help of domain experts, adding more games, and deploying and testing the framework on the Internet

Learning JavaScript in a Local Playground

JavaScript is currently one of the most popular languages worldwide. Its meteoric rise is mainly due to the fact that the language is no longer bound to the limits of the browser and can now be used on several platforms. This growth has led to its increasing use by companies and, consequently, to become part of the curriculum in schools. Meanwhile, in the teaching-learning process of computer programming, teachers continue to use automatic code evaluation systems to relieve their time-consuming and error prone evaluation work. However, these systems reveal a number of issues: they are very generic (one size fits all), they have scarce features to foster exercises authoring, they do not adhere to interoperability standards (e.g. LMS communication), they rely solely on remote evaluators being exposed to single point of failure problems and reducing application performance and user experience, which is a feature well appreciated by the mobile users. In this context, LearnJS is presented as a Web playground for practicing the JavaScript language. The system uses a local evaluator (the user\u27s own browser) making response times small and thus benefiting the user experience. LearnJS also uses a sophisticated authoring system that allows the teacher to quickly create new exercises and aggregate them into gamified activities. Finally, LearnJS includes universal LMS connectors based on international specifications. In order to validate its use, an evaluation was made by a group of students of Porto Polytechnic aiming to validate the usability of its graphical user interface

Learning JavaScript in a local playground

JavaScript is currently one of the most popular languages worldwide. Its meteoric rise is mainly due to the fact that the language is no longer bound to the limits of the browser and can now be used on several platforms. This growth has led to its increasing use by companies and, consequently, to become part of the curriculum in schools. Meanwhile, in the teaching-learning process of computer programming, teachers continue to use automatic code evaluation systems to relieve their timeconsuming and error prone evaluation work. However, these systems reveal a number of issues: they are very generic (one size fits all), they have scarce features to foster exercises authoring, they do not adhere to interoperability standards (e.g. LMS communication), they rely solely on remote evaluators being exposed to single point of failure problems and reducing application performance and user experience, which is a feature well appreciated by the mobile users. In this context, LearnJS is presented as a Web playground for practicing the JavaScript language. The system uses a local evaluator (the user’s own browser) making response times small and thus benefiting the user experience. LearnJS also uses a sophisticated authoring system that allows the teacher to quickly create new exercises and aggregate them into gamified activities. Finally, LearnJS includes universal LMS connectors based on international specifications. In order to validate its use, an evaluation was made by a group of students of Porto Polytechnic aiming to validate the usability of its graphical user interface.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Assessing the Efficacy of Incorporating Game Dynamics in a Learning Management System

The goal of the study was to see if gamification of a Learning Management System (LMS) would increase a number of desirable outcomes: student interest, motivation, satisfaction, student learning and perception of pedagogical affect. These constructs were measured in a survey, except for learning, which was measured by grades. Gamification of the LMS included the addition of all of the following: (1) An illustrated hero’s adventure storyline with monsters to overcome by completing quests (assignments and assessments), (2) Olympic colored badges to represent individual grades as well as overall progress, (3) Points earned on a game-like scale—e.g., 100,000 points for the course, (4) A leaderboard with anonymous names and avatars, (5) Lives which allowed students to turn in a fixed number of late assignments without penalty. While open-ended responses suggested that students appreciated some gamification aspects, the quantitative data suggested that gamification has virtually no effect on the constructs measured. Only relatedness (a sub-construct of motivation) and student interest were found to be significant, although with small effect sizes. This study contributes to existing literature by exploring the impact of gamification of an LMS for a required introductory course in information systems